Small Delay Tracing Defect Testing

This Small Delay Tracing Defect Testing detect small delay defects by creating internal signal races. The races are created by launching transitions along simultaneous two paths, a reference path and a test path. The arrival times of the transitions on a ‘convergence’ or common gate determine the result of the race. On the output of the convergence gate, a static hazard created by a small delay defect presence on the test path which is directed to the input of a scan-latch. A glitch detector is added to the scan latch which records the presence or absence of the glitch.

Pushing Failure Mode Stimulus to Overcome the Limitation/Boundaries of Soft Defect Localization Tools

Temperature dependent failures are some of the most challenging cases that will be encountered by the analyst. Soft Defect Localization (SDL) is a technique used to analyze such temperature-dependent, ‘soft defect’ failures [1]. There are many literatures that discuss this technique and its different applications [2-7]. Dynamic Analysis by Laser Stimulation (DALS) is one of the known SDL implementations [8-11]. However, there are cases where the failure is occurring at a temperature where the laser alone is not sufficient to effectively induce a change of device behavior. In these situations, the analyst needs to think out of the box by understanding how the device will react to external conditions and to make necessary adjustments in DALS settings. This paper will discuss three cases that presents different challenges such as performing DALS analysis where the failing temperature is too high for the laser to induce a change of behavior from ambient temperature, cold temperature failure, complex triggering (Serial Peripheral Interface, SPI), and using an internal signal as input for DALS analysis. The approach used for a successful DALS analysis of each case will be discussed in detail.

Judgments of agency are affected by sensory noise without recruiting metacognitive processing

Judgments of agency, our sense of control over our actions and the environment, are often assumed to be metacognitive. We examined this assumption at the computational level by comparing the effects of sensory noise on agency judgments to those on confidence judgements, which are widely accepted to be metacognitive in nature. In two tasks, participants rated agency, or confidence in a decision about their agency, over a virtual hand that tracked their movements, either synchronously or with a delay, under high and low noise. We compared the predictions of two computational models to participants’ ratings and found that agency ratings, unlike confidence, were best explained by a model involving no metacognitive noise estimates. We propose that agency judgments reflect first-order measures of the internal signal, without involving metacognitive computations, challenging the assumed link between the two cognitive processes.

Nonnatural Mental Representation

This chapter distinguishes between two types of representation, natural and nonnatural. It argues that nonnatural representation is necessary to explain intentionality. It also argues that traditional accounts of the semantic content of mental representations are insufficient to explain nonnatural representation and, therefore, intentionality. To remedy this, the chapter sketches an account of nonnatural representation in terms of natural representation plus offline simulation of nonactual environments plus tracking the ways in which a simulation departs from the actual environment. To represent nonnaturally, a system must be able to decouple internal simulations from sensory information by activating representational resources offline. The system must be able to represent things that are not in the actual environment and to track that it’s doing so; i.e., there must be an internal signal or state that can indicate whether what is represented departs from the actual environment. In addition, the system must be able to manipulate a representation independently of what happens in the actual environment and keep track that it’s doing so. In short, nonnatural representations are offline simulations whose departure from the actual environment the system has the function to keep track of. This is a step toward a naturalistic, mechanistic, neurocomputational account of intentionality.

Corollary Discharge Contributions to Perceptual Continuity Across Saccades

Our vision depends upon shifting our high-resolution fovea to objects of interest in the visual field. Each saccade displaces the image on the retina, which should produce a chaotic scene with jerks occurring several times per second. It does not. This review examines how an internal signal in the primate brain (a corollary discharge) contributes to visual continuity across saccades. The article begins with a review of evidence for a corollary discharge in the monkey and evidence from inactivation experiments that it contributes to perception. The next section examines a specific neuronal mechanism for visual continuity, based on corollary discharge that is referred to as visual remapping. Both the basic characteristics of this anticipatory remapping and the factors that control it are enumerated. The last section considers hypotheses relating remapping to the perceived visual continuity across saccades, including remapping's contribution to perceived visual stability across saccades.

Confidence boosts serial dependence in orientation estimation

In the absence of external feedback, a decision maker must rely on a subjective estimate of their decision accuracy in order to appropriately guide behavior. Normative models of perceptual decision making relate subjective estimates of internal signal quality (e.g. confidence) directly to the internal signal quality itself, thereby making it unknowable whether the subjective estimate or the underlying signal is what drives behavior. We constructed stimuli that dissociated human observer’s performance on a visual estimation task from their subjective estimates of confidence in their performance, thus violating normative principles. To understand whether confidence influences future decision making, we examined serial dependence in observer’s responses, a phenomenon whereby the estimate of a stimulus on the current trial can be biased towards the stimulus from the previous trial. We found that when decisions were made with high confidence, they conferred stronger biases upon the following trial, suggesting that confidence may enhance serial dependence. Critically, this finding was true also when confidence was experimentally dissociated from task performance, indicating that subjective confidence, independent of signal quality, can amplify serial dependence. These findings demonstrate an effect of confidence on future behavior, independent of task performance, and suggest that perceptual decisions incorporate recent history in an uncertainty-weighted manner, but where the uncertainty carried forward is a subjectively estimated and possibly suboptimal readout of objective sensory uncertainty.